“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” – Loren Eiseley
For centuries, Tulare Lake occupied the cultural and spiritual center of the Tachi Yokut tribe of California’s Central Valley. The lake was foundational to the tribe’s creation story and provided the resources needed to thrive. Between the late 19th– and early 20th–centuries, a rather direct form of anthropological climate change saw the lake drained completely dry, devasting the Tachi Yokut way of life. Upstream waters were dammed and diverted with abandon, and the region was largely converted to prime agricultural farmland. Since that time, elders of the tribe tell stories of the lake’s mythical role in their people’s former way of life, passing down the belief that it would someday be returned to them.
In 2023, salvation arrived in the form of “the greatest year-over-year water gains in two decades.” Throughout California, historic drought has been beaten back by a string of monstrous precipitation episodes, leaving the media rather confused as to whether this is something to be celebrated. For the Tachi Yokut tribe, the recent turn of events is nothing short of a miracle, as Tulare Lake has indeed reappeared as the elders had prophesized. They are now fighting with state authorities to keep the lake the way it was before settlers interfered. Here’s how the Los Angeles Times describes the surprising turn of events (emphasis added throughout):
“During the winter, as heavy rains and snow swept across California, rivers that had dwindled during the drought swelled with runoff and flowed full from the Sierra Nevada into the valley, spilling from channels and gushing through broken levees onto farmland. As the floodwaters inundated fields that had produced tomatoes and cotton, workers evacuated tractors, pumps and sprinkler pipes.
By mid-March, the lake had reclaimed more than 10,000 acres. It continued growing, inundating dairies, pistachio orchards and farmhouses. It rose beside levees that protect the city of Corcoran and its giant prison complex. The lake has now grown to cover more than 113,000 acres, an area nearly as large as Lake Tahoe.”
Here we have an example of nature undoing artificially altered ecosystems, restoring the region to its pre-industrial form more closely. This development would seem to align with the stated objectives of progressive environmentalists. For those displaced by the floods, the affair has undoubtedly been a tragedy—difficult tradeoffs are inevitable under all climate scenarios. As noted by ecologist-turned-climate-skeptic Jim Steele, much of the traditional media has been putting a rather more negative spin on this unexpected turn of events. A recent NBC News article ominously titled “Climate in Crisis: Tulare Lake Reforms Causing Flooding” unironically claims “area people have worked for a century to make California’s Tulare Basin into a food grower's paradise,” and the reappearance of the lake is “another example weather whiplash due to the influence of climate change which can make extremes more intense and more frequent.”
Whiplash, indeed.
The winter of 2022-2023 has revitalized much of the US Southwest, including the all-important Colorado River Basin. When we last checked in on the sixth longest river in North America, the situation was reaching a breaking point. The economic livelihood of 40 million people was under threat, as were the operations of two of the largest hydroelectric dams in the country. Is the crisis now over, or is this just a temporary reprieve? What can this episode teach us about our capacity to effectively respond to an ever-changing climate? Let’s cut through the propaganda and examine the source data for some concrete answers.